If this doesn’t get you out of your Hummer, likely nothing will.

A new model forecasting the world’s snowpack looks super slushy. Here’s the picture for 2100: the South American Andes will have less than half their current winter snowpack; European and Western U.S. ranges will have lost nearly half of their snow-bound water; New Zealand will have lost almost all of its snowy peaks.

This rotten news comes from Steven Ghan and Timothy Shippert, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland and is being published in a paper in the Journal of Climate.

Snow pack predictions for 2100. Ghan and Shippert/PNNL

Their model allows for more detailed predictions than those possible in the past, generating “an unprecedented picture of climate change.”

“The decline in winter snowpack means less spring and summer runoff from snowmelt. That translates to unprecedented pressure on people worldwide who depend on summertime melting of the winter snowpack for irrigation and drinking water.”

A few more numbers for the end of the century that might get people to consider the bus over their Buick:
- Alaska will maintain 64 percent of its year 2000 snowpack
- The Alps will be at 61 percent
- The Sierras, Cascades and southern Rockies will be at 57 percent
- Peaks in New Zealand will be at 16 percent

And for those folks who enjoy berating me when I write about global warming — which they loosely define as enviro-group driven hype — PNNL, the institution providing this research is “a DOE Office of Science laboratory that solves complex problems in energy, national security, the environment and life sciences by advancing the understanding of physics, chemistry, biology and computation.” Sounds like a bunch of left-leaning wackos to me.